Summer camps offer a unique opportunity to have open air activities which perfectly combine play and learning.
This is certainly the case with the Sestante di Venezia’s camps, which each summer bring to the island of San Servolo groups of kids to enjoy the unique environment of the place, given also the great attention that Sestante pays to “green activities” like growing a vegetable garden or navigating the lagoon of Venice only by electric boat.
VIU TEN Program collaborates with Sestante, by introducing activities linked to the international perspective of sustainable development (such as the SDGs). This year we contributed to the summer camp organized for middle-school boys and girls. We identified them as “the Greta Thunberg generation”. And that’s why we decided to play with them on Climate Change and fake news.
Their knowledge of what Climate Change is, how it can affect their lives and what each of them can do to mitigate it was really impressive. It was also impressive to see their reactions to photos or news that were apparently reliable sources but that in fact were totally misrepresenting the issue. Raising the awareness on how environmental science is communicated and perceived was in fact the goal of our game.
This is part of a wider research project on Science Communication that the VIU TEN Program is coordinating, funded by the EU Commission within Horizon 2020 (questproject.eu ).